Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Moscow Policies Force Russian Pharmaceutical Firms to Reduce or Even Suspend Production of Vital Medicines

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 11 – Russian pharmaceutical
firms, caught between government-imposed prices on vital medicines and
dramatically rising costs for foreign components, are dramatically cutting back
or even ending the production of vital medicines putting the health of
thousands upon thousands of Russians at risk.

And this situation, compounded by
Moscow’s counter-sanctions, means that many are going to suffer even though
Vladimir Putin promised in his “Direct Line” broadcast to address the situation
and even though the government has pledged to address the issue and possibly raise
subsidies to the firms sometime this summer.

The paper’s Anastasiya Demidova
reports that “the government has less than a month in order to decide the issue
of [state] support for certain inexpensive medicines, a category that includes
the most widely used drugs and one that Russian consumers are thus most
sensitive to any change.

But even if the government increases
subsidies for the manufacture of these medications, experts say, there will be
a delay in the restarting of regular production, with some companies not just
reducing production but eliminating it entirely and then re-registering the new
medications after subsidies go up.

The Russian government maintains a
list of 646 medications that it deems vitally important. Seventy percent of
these are produced in Russia, including many of the most inexpensive and widely
used. But many of these include imported components and prices for those have
gone up dramatically with the fall of the ruble (snob.ru/selected/entry/108216).